No, this essay is not about the prospects of The District of Columbia, Northern California or even Puerto Rico, being added to our flag in order to stack the Senate and House deck with new legislators. I am talking about the constant state of confusion and near insanity that has overcome our moral institutions in American society, especially on sex.
I remember vividly listening to sports Hall of Fame announcer Jack Buck play with one of his sponsors on their ad-lib radio ads. Steve Misarany was a consummate showman. His limited natural skills were highlighted by his innate ability to repeat the same phrase, Don’t be confused ad nauseum while Buck addled him into further excited nonsense. I saw them as a commercial version of Abbott and Costello. I loved to listen to the two banter with Misarany being oblivious to Jack’s presence. I do not know how many refrigerators Steve and Jack sold, but they were a hilarious team.
Alas, this is not the kind of playful confusion that has befallen us. On matters of sex and marriage, our 51st state reminds me of the priceless ad for Aflac Insurance. While the Aflac iconic duck listens incredulously to baseball player and barbershop philosopher, Yogi Berra inform his listeners that he had the insurance that you really need if you don’t have it and that’s why you need it. And sometimes they give you cash which is as good as real money. Our sexual confusion did not happen over-night. To Marxists all these recent sexual issues, such as abortion, feminism, gay marriage, and sexual identity have been designed to drive a deeper wedge between traditional Americans and each new generation. Our main hope is that these groups will start ganging up on each other, as they fight for an equal seat at the Woke table.
My wife and I recently watched a movie about a trio of gal pals and their relationships with their sons. On Mother’s Day when their three men forgot or ignored their big day, more out of hurt feelings than anything else, their moms drove together to New York City from their suburban homes in Westchester County to surprise their boys and fill them with buckets full of guilt. The case of Paul, the homosexual son of the character played by Felicity Huffman, best illustrates how confused our situation has become.
Paul played skillfully by Jake Lacy, tells his mother in front of her friends that he has no intention of having children of his own, while stating that gays do have children, though he left unsaid… but not like you and dad or any other heterosexual couple. He had lesbian friends who were a couple that wanted to have children. Since he loved them, presumably like sisters, he volunteered to donate his sperm to the mother-to-be that could be injected into her body so she could conceive. He did this out of friendship, love and charity, all Christian virtues…at least in his heart.
Though his agitated mother was no rocket scientist, she figured out that she was about to be a grandmother or so she thought. Paul’s baby (?) had already been born, so his mother goes on a shopping spree, buying a truckload of clothes and equipment for her alleged grandchild. When the grandmother stalks the new mom in the park, they talk. Paul’s mom, Helen is bluntly told that her child already has grandparents through her and her husband or is it her wife? Paul has also signed an agreement that he has no claims to paternity. At the end of the film, they all celebrate the new normal ? in parental relationships, despite all the confusion as to whom are the real grandmothers. This theatrical state of confusion would have driven even Misarany and Buck over the edge, like Thelma and Louise. As a near great-grandfather (December), I do not like anyone tampering with my well-earned family titles.
While homosexual marriage in one form or another, is probably going to be with us for a long time, like abortion, the language of marriage and child bearing has been imperiously violated. Biology does not seem to be a science any more but more a personal preference. Take the case of husband and wife. I pride myself on my 50 years and 42 days with my late Irish wife as I do my being a husband to my Italian wife of 43 months. I trust both women liked or like being my wife. These two words should mean a lot to married people. They do to me!
Maybe that’s why gay marriages have culturally misappropriated these strictly-defined terms for their own marriages in their vain attempts to be something they can never be.
I also wonder just who changed the meaning of these words? Most homosexual couples seem to have an obvious dominant partner, especially lesbian unions. It is very easy to pick the man out. But a woman masquerading as a man is still a biological woman. President Abraham Lincoln illustrated this with a riddle he often posed to visitors: how many legs would a cow have if you counted his tail as a leg? Most answered hesitantly, five? Lincoln responded that the answer was four…counting a tail as a leg does not make it a leg. It was in a French film where I first encountered a lesbian refer to her partner as her wife. This marital nomenclature has become standard fare in our present culture for a long while.
Both my wives had the same friend at one of our local department stores. He was in sales and in 2019, we offered to take him and a female colleague to dinner. The woman took ill and just the three of us went out. When we all came back to our home, he raved about his marriage to his male wife. Raised Catholic, he showed us a picture of his first wife, a stunning blonde woman, which really made me wonder. Then he showed us his second wife, a younger man.
Almost a year later, I was waiting for my wife in his department while she shopped. He came over to me and we started chatting. He told me again how happy he was with his husband, the same guy who had been his wife. Whoa Nellie! Now I am really confused. The words are not fungible. In two minutes, he had rendered both the idea of a husband and wife meaningless. Perhaps, that is the point, not of these lonely and sexually confused people who bear a very serious and dangerous burden, but for the Cultural Iconoclasts who realize what George Orwell said, those who control the language control the culture. I also definitely see shades of Antonio Gramsci and his long march through the culture at work here.
In matters of sexology, science, especially Freudian Psychiatry, cannot be trusted. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) removed homosexuality as a mental disorder from the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) after many years in their text books. This decision was a significant victory for homosexual activists, and they have continued to claim that the APA based their decision on new scientific discoveries that proved that homosexual behavior is normal and should be affirmed in our culture.
The APA also affirms that same-sex sexual and romantic attractions, feelings, and behaviors are normal and positive variations of human sexuality regardless of sexual orientation identity. This has continued to be their unscientific gospel truth ever since, the immutable law of gay sexology. Dissenting scientists do so at their own career risks. The APA says several scientific studies warranted their change. This is false and part of numerous homosexual urban legends that have infiltrated every aspect of our scientific culture. I remembering reading in the mid-seventies that the APA had been bullied by several gay organizations into normalizing them.
Perhaps, the recent emergence of Transgendered people has some direct bearing on all this confusion. Books and films do much to popularize and normalize pervasive life styles. My first recollection of Trans was in the 1982 movie, The World According to Garp, starring Robin Williams. Character actor, John Lithgow played a very muscular woman who informs Garp that he used to be a tight end for the Philadelphia Eagles. In retrospect, I am not surprised that the author of Garp was noticeably woke then because in 1999 he exposed his unadulterated support for abortion in another book and film, The Cider House Rules.
If I had awakened in 1953, and told my parents that today, I felt like the Queen of Sheba or Little Bo-Peep, they would have rightfully taken me to someone in a white coat. All of this sexual confusion has a name. Gender dysphoriacan be described as a condition where a person is uneasy because they feel there is a mismatch between their actual sexual feelings and their biological organs and characteristics. Its causes could stem from a variety of conditions, such as genetics, hormonal, and even environmental. If hormones or their environment are involved, it could be treated and get the child back on the normal tract or they might even grow out of it. However, the cultural commissars in the psychiatric establishment say most of these children grow up to be gay or lesbian. This has become the orthodoxy in sexology with severe sanctions imposed if not accepted and promoted. I think this is more agitprop than real science.
What these psychiatrists are saying is that gender dysphoria could be at the root cause of a person being gay. In accord with that idea, they have taken the next Satanic step as they prey on our children who have been told for years that the planet will implode in 8-10 years because of the hollow threat of Climate Change. No wonder these kids are terrified and confused about virtually everything. The American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged doctors to begin chemical reassignment therapy on thousands of prepubescent children. This will ensure many more children grow up gay. On a different level, many trangendered women and girls now claim the right to play sports against biological women, and even shower with high school girls and college women. This is highly suspect and an obvious inequality in the name of inclusion.
Transvestites or cross-dressers have been around since the 16th century. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of ‘androgyne‘ was recorded in 1552, but it has only been in the last 10 years that people have claimed it for themselves to describe a state of being in-between, or having both genders. Transvestite‘ originated in 1910 from the German sexologist, homosexual Magnus Hirschfeld, who would later develop the Berlin Institute where the very first sex change operations took place. Transsexual‘ was not coined until 1949, transgender‘ not until 1971, and trans,‘ a very British term, not until 1996. ‘Polygender’ is a late 1990s Californian invention used to describe a state of being multiple genders.
I remember all the crude jokes about Christine Jorgenson in the fifties and then there was Renee Richards, a trangendered woman who played professional tennis. Jorgensen, a former American GI, returned from Denmark where he had undergone the first of several operations as part of his gender reassignment. Overnight he/she became a news sensation, and was undoubtedly the most famous transsexual figure in the 20th century. As a woman on the surface, Christine was beautiful, blond, and the ideal of the ‘all-American girl‘. As one obituary put it: Her very public life after her 1952 transition and surgery was a model for other transsexuals for decades. She was a tireless lecturer on the subject of transsexuality, pleading for understanding from a public that all too often wanted to see transsexuals as freaks or perverts.
Dr. Renee Richards was born Richard Raskind on August 19, 1934, in New York City and raised, as a nice Jewish boy in my hometown of Forest Hills in Queens. After high school Richards attended Yale and was captain of the men’s tennis team. He was considered by some to be one of the best college tennis players in the country. He played competitive tennis for a while and was ranked sixth out of the top 20 males over 35. At Yale, Richards began cross-dressing, which at the time was considered to be a perversion, with transsexualism classified as a form of insanity. Richards named his female persona Renée, which is French for reborn.
Richards’ struggle with gender identity created sexual confusion, depression, and suicidal tendencies. She began seeing Dr. Charles Ihlenfeld, a disciple of Harry Benjamin who specialized in endocrinology, transsexualism, and sexual reassignment. In the early 1970s, Richards underwent his sex reassignment surgery. In 1976, his gender reassignment was outed by local TV anchor Richard Carlson the father of current Fox broadcaster Tucker Carlson. After repeated refusals to take the Barr body test, Richards finally relented and test results were ambiguous. Richards refused to take it again and was summarily barred from competing in the U. S. Open, Wimbledon and the Italian Open in 1976. Richards then sued the USTA, which runs the US Open, in New York state court, alleging discrimination by gender in violation of the New York Human Rights Law. He won his game, set and match in the legal court.
Who could forget The Lady Chablis, the unabashed transgender queen, from Savannah, Georgia? She became a trans icon after in the 1990s through John Berendt’s book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and its film adaption. The word transvestite seems to have disappeared from Google though Webster’s still defines it as an older term for cross-dresser. In popular culture, cross-dressers seem to have an ambiguous quality that covers all their bases. Innocuous films, such as Tootsie, Some Like it Hot, and Mrs. Doubtfire deal with career, physical survival and divorce situations while The Crying Game is hardcore cross-dressing.
I can cite one personal example that might make some sort of perverse sense. About 10 years ago, I read an article in our local urban magazine about the new owners of a bookstore. The husband and wife team had a make-up, unlike any I had ever encountered in fiction or real life. The husband was a transgendered male and his wife a lesbian. Perhaps, their marriage on the surface at least, might serve as the key to understanding all this confusion. The wife was not attracted to the husband’s outward or newly-acquired masculinity but the feminine side of his dual nature that no reassignment surgery, a misnomer if there ever was one, could disguise. By falling for her husband’s female self that he/she had abandoned, she was true to her lesbian self. Are you confused yet? I think I am. Welcome to America’s fifty-first state.
